I'm currently making plans for creating my own website (.com) and was looking for the cheapest solution possible that gives you the production tools you need.

I was wondering, are most websites these days made by "website wizards" or whatever they are called, that you just configure and tweak, or do most websites involve a lot of programming? (I am currently a CS major but need to budget my time so website providers that give you a lot of flexibility and control over how your site works, but minimizes programming would probably be the best solution).

I'm basically looking for the most direct way to establish my own website with its own domain name. Probably the most complex service it will need to provide is that (privileged) visitors with an account/password to my website should be able to edit the webpages. There will also be a need to make this visually appealing.

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3 Answers
3

If you don't want to do programming at all, the solution would be something like Joomla, but if you want to do a little programming and give some flexibility to the site, use some thing like Codeigniter,Yii, and list goes on.

Although Joomla has been suggested, i would personally recommend you to use a WordPress based website and get a slick theme for it.

Out of all CMS i have tried, i found WordPress to have the best i-dont-want-to-spend-time-on-it-but-i-want-it-to-look-awesome ratio, especially with themes from the envato markedplace called ThemeForest.

The themes on ThemeForest go as low a $1 and they are usually of a pretty good quality, looking at the price.

So it is actually pretty easy getting a website running. All you need is a host that gives you a webhotel with PHP and mySQL (and a tiny bit .htaccess flexibility, but most have that). When you have this, you upload the installation and you go through the famous 5-minute-installer and BAM it works.